A Blogger’s Guide To Linking For Accessibility

Featured Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash Note: Every link in this post goes to the same place: WebAIM’s guide to accessible hyperlinks. I’m using this link as an example for demonstrating accessible and inaccessible linking styles. Let’s Talk About Links In Blog Posts There’s a particular style of linking common in blog posts that seems to date from the early days of the blog-o-sphere, in which bloggers embed a series of links in the body of their blogRead more

Accountability, Equity, and Flat Teams in Tech

Building and maintaining healthy teams is real work that takes time and effort–especially if you’re trying to organize people to get something done. Doing that work within a flat or “leaderless” team can be rewarding–but the work of managing doesn’t disappear if you decide not to have managers.Read more

How “Good Intent” Undermines Diversity and Inclusion

Telling people to “assume good intent” is a sign that if they come to you with a concern, you will minimize their feelings, police their reactions, and question their perceptions. It tells marginalized people that you don’t see codes of conduct as tools to address systemic discrimination, but as tools to manage personal conflicts without taking power differences into account.Read more

Notes from a Female Farmer

Start a story with a farm boy and by the end, he’ll be a hero.

I grew up a geek girl on a dairy farm. My mother milked cows the day I was born. Thirty-three years later, I’m waking at 4:30 in the morning, tugging on my coveralls and muck boots, and heading out to a barn filled with fifty milk cows. Having descended from generations of rural Pennsylvania dairy farmers my agricultural roots are easy to pinpoint. My geek origins are more diffuse.Read more

Reflections on Mulan

From the porcelain doll to the kung fu master— two benevolent stereotypes which all Asian Americans have faced at one point or other. But both ideal femininity and ideal masculinity are carefully manufactured. No one can achieve these ideals, particularly not Mulan, however hard she tries.Read more

Representation Shouldn’t Have A Limit

For the past couple of years, the demand for better representation has been pretty heated between those who have it and those who don’t. If you are white, male, straight, and cisgender, then you’re in the first group. If you’re not, then you’re tired of not seeing yourself and seeing bad representations of yourself in the media you enjoy. Yet, there are also some who have so little decent representation that they feel threatened by other groups who want the same.Read more

Silencing Tactics and You

There are few things in life more fraught than talking about what makes us who we are in public–and even more so if those things are also sources of oppression or marginalization. Something that often compounds that vulnerability are tactics designed to shame or bully people into silence when they do speak out–even if they are only sharing our lived experience and not calling anyone out.Read more

Fundraising, Activism, and Who Gets Paid

When you’re interested in donating money to help improve conditions for women in tech, you need to be aware that clueless and unscrupulous people will take advantage of your good intentions to line their own pockets. Before you donate, assess projects with a critical eye. What is the project runner’s track record? What’s their angle? Who are they centering? Who’s getting paid?Read more

How to Opt out of Stolen

Companies that get called out for not taking into account how your products can harm marginalized people could do worse than to follow Chen’s example. He apologized, acknowledged the problem, committed to trying to fix it, and worked to get an opt-out solution out the door quickly.Read more

Diversity Panels I’d Like To See

A good diversity panel doesn’t try to tackle the entire ‘diversity issue’ in a single hour. Instead, choose a more focused topic that will give panelists a chance to share their perspective and experience while grounding the discussion in something concrete, so it’s accessible to an audience that hasn’t necessarily done all their homework.Read more